Interface Design Subteam

Membership: Hill (leader), Beard (U. Maine, Orono), Carver, Frew, Dolin, Nideffer, Clarke, Ramsey (Mojave Desert Project); Smith.

Mission Statement of Team: The goal of the Interface Design Subteam is to develop a web interface for the ADL that (1) represents the functionality and the content of ADL to users; (2) is responsive to the feedback obtained from users to the beta web interface; (3) incorporates user interface design concepts from ongoing research and development; and (4) advances the practice of interface design for digital libraries and for geospatial search and retrieval.

The Interface Design Team (ID) began by reviewing the documents provided by the Interface Evaluation and Target User Group activities: issue papers for search, retrieval and processing functionality; user scenarios; user requirement statements for search, retrieval, processing, interface and navigation, and content (what the library should contain). They also reviewed the reports from the Target User Groups and the preliminary results of the user evaluation studies.

Research on the original Alexandria Library in Egypt was also brought to the first meetings as a possible source of inspiration for interface metaphors to make the ADL interface visually attractive and appealing.

The model of traditional library service - and space - was chosen as the starting point for interface development. Instances of ``library spaces'' on the web were found as examples and models were developed by team members based on traditional library services. The components identified included:

• Welcome statement giving an overview of the library's holdings and services ;
• Reference desk for personalized help and customized services ;
• Stacks and cases for browsing the collection ;
• Online catalog of library collection ;
• Electronic resources: CD-ROMs, other library collections, etc. ;
• "What's New" or "What's Popular" displays ;
• Reference Tools, such as dictionaries, thesauri, gazetteers, directories ;
• Current newspapers and magazines ;
• Special collections and areas, including a Children's Library ;
• Circulation desk for registration and borrowing copies ;
• Photocopy machines ;
• Meeting rooms ;
• Exhibits ;
• Technical Processing: behind the scene activities where selection, cataloging, indexing, and processing of library materials takes place.

Using this as a starting point, the team considered how these services would change in an electronic implementation of a digital library - what the electronic equivalent of these services would or should be.

Other interface design efforts were reviewed, especially work done at Stanford (Dlite, SenseMaker, and STARTS).

Several initial designs for the interface were developed to get the process started. Four interacting frames were first proposed: Library, Search, Map, and Results. Design goals for the interface emerged from the discussion:

• the map component should always be visible on the interface ;
• the functionality should support iterative searching where the results of one search can be selectively used to form a new search ;
• visualization of the result sets is an important component ;
• the user should be informed of the total number of items in the result set ;
• the user should be able to sort result sets according to temporal, spatial, and thematic attributes ;
• results sets should be ranked in relation to the query along spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions ;
• queries and result sets should be kept during a session so that they are reusable;
• a user workspace or workspaces should exist where selected items from a result set can be stored. results sets can be thought of as subsets of the whole library collection and the same processing to provide overviews of the contents of the whole collection can be applied to the result subsets;
• search options should be presented in a small set of search types that hides the complexity of the metadata;
• at least two levels of search should be available for novice and advanced searching based on the task at hand rather than a category of user.

Issues identified:

• map adjustment functions (e.g. zooming) should be clearly separated from other uses of the map such as clicking on a footprint to get more information ;
• it would be good to mock up several approaches to the map browser and do user tests with them;
• a model is needed for the use of (interaction with) external tools, such as thesauri, map tools, etc. An extensible model where new search, retrieval, and processing tools can be plugged in and tested;
• user needs to understand the results of their actions on other parts of the interface - an interaction flow/process orientation to design;
• cooperation between the components of the interface need to be explicitly defined: some components will be independent units that can come and go; others will have a slave relationship to the state of the other components;
• scale issues with displaying a large number of footprints on the map need to be addressed;
• display formats for metadata are needed;
• querying non-contiguous geographic regions and periodic temporal intervals ;
• how to show the user the progress of the query;
• how to support user contributions to ADL: gazetteer entries, metadata for collections or items, and the data/information items themselves .

Design ideas:

• use of folder tabs as the interface device to show result sets;
• use of icons to represent the temporal, spatial, and textural relevance of items in the result set to the query;
• build a map viewfinder that would reveal information about a place as it moves over or is positioned on a place.

Progress to date: A prototype has been created and is being refined by the designer from input from the team. Weekly versions of the prototype are online for Team comments through a threaded email discussion list. Functionalities to be supported by the interface, in addition to the ones already included in ADL, are being identified; if they are not currently feasible, they provide a direction for future interface development.